LendingCrowd expands its team

written by Adrian Innespublished on August 13, 2018

Article written by Adrian Innes, Head of Origination at LendingCrowd

Festival season is in full swing, and Edinburgh is buzzing with tourists and performers from every corner of the globe. Some residents may grumble about the crowds and the blizzards of flyers, but this artistic extravaganza really shows the capital at its best.

Predictably, the arrival of the festivals means the heatwave has given way to some much-needed rain, but that hasn’t put a dampener on activities at LendingCrowd, the only peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform headquartered in Scotland.

We recently expanded our business development team with the appointment of Jordan Wright, who is working alongside Riley O’Dwyer and Thomas Boyd to forge closer links with our fantastic community of introducers and individual business owners.

Our loans origination reached record levels during the first half of the year, with total lending of £13.9 million for the six months to the end of June – up from £4.9 million for the same period last year. Lending in Scotland trebled to £3.9 million as awareness of our brand and business model continues to grow.

These encouraging results coincided with another milestone – it’s a year since I joined LendingCrowd as Head of Origination, following three decades in the banking sector.

I passionately believe that small businesses need – and deserve – access to a wide range of funding sources to continue to thrive in these uncertain times. SMEs are the powerhouse of our economy, accounting for more than 99% of the business population, but many still struggle to access the funds that allow them to grow and enter new markets.

Competitive rates and rapid loan turnaround times mean that more borrowers are turning to specialist P2P business lenders like LendingCrowd. Research from the British Business Bank in February showed that net bank lending was relatively flat last year, but P2P business lending volumes rose by 51% to almost £1.8 billion.

Since inception, we’ve helped hundreds of SMEs secure more than £41 million in funding and we've got a real ambition to make P2P lending mainstream as shown by our recent "Think Outside The Bank" campaign that you can see at www.lendingcrowd.com/borrower .